


the earth lost its spin

by rizahawkaye



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Child Death, F/M, Heavy Angst, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 21:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17732804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: Roy and Riza are humans first, soldiers second. Riza gets pregnant, she loses the baby, and Roy has to reach inside himself to find the courage to hold her close. [Read the notes before you read the story, please.]





	the earth lost its spin

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes i feel things and sometimes they come out in fics like this one. please -- if the content is triggering for you -- don't read.

The leather was flaking off the old chair, and so Roy kept digging into it nervously, petting it until it caught under his fingernails and fell away. He was amassing a pile of it beside him. He saw a nurse at the nurse’s station swivel in her chair to peer at the mess, and then shake her head. Roy didn’t care. She sat behind her rounded desk and stuffed her face full of lukewarm leftover pasta and answered questions in bored, dragging tones that sounded like they belonged at a funeral, not in a hospital waiting room. A tiny pile of already-peeling-and-cracked leather wasn’t going to hurt her.

Beside him, Rebecca’s hair ducked in and out of view. Frizzy and a deep chocolate brown, Roy saw it in his periphery each time she turned her face to look at him. She expected him to lift his eyes from the floor, but they were glued there, stationary. The blinding white fluorescents buzzed above him, unwelcoming to his already stinging eyes, and he wasn’t prepared for them yet. He could nearly hear the flies dying against the searing bulbs, their wings humming along to the buzz of electricity in the hospital’s old and lichen green walls. Each time the heel of his boot tapped on the linoleum he felt the ebb of energy coming and going, like the hospital staff was a herd and he could track their movements in the earth. No, he was not prepared to face any part of this place. 

Riza was having a baby somewhere in the building. Roy was not permitted to be in the room, because as far as the hospital was concerned, this child had no father. As far as Rebecca was concerned, this child had a father who deserved to _ literally fall into a pit of boiling acid and have his dick chopped off for good measure.  _ It’s not that simple, he wanted to tell her, it’s not that easy. But Rebecca fluctuated in and out of anger even now. Her legs were crossing and uncrossing, her arms were folded over her chest and then unfolded. She was as energetic as Roy was not. She knew exactly where to put her pent-up trepidation and it was not into the sun-dried leather she sat on. Roy found himself opening his mouth and then closing it again, over and over, repeatedly. If he told someone — anyone, even Rebecca — that Riza Hawkeye was writhing on a hospital bed on a floor up, up, up and away from him, the father, then maybe he could hold her hand. Maybe he wouldn’t have to wait downstairs and listen to the nurse smack her pasta and and tell people,  _ Fill out this form and we’ll be right with you _ .

But this was the deal they had divined through the chaos of her pregnancy. Riza would sleep with a fictitious, faceless, nameless man, and Roy would fade away into the nothingness of...whatever nothingness could be when you had a child but needed to pretend you didn’t. He closed his eyes and saw her rounded belly, ever growing. He cupped his face and saw her, exhausted, a baby cradled in the crook of her elbow, propped up on her breasts. His and hers and  _ his _ , by all rights,  _ his _ . 

But the world didn’t work that way.

A doctor flew into the waiting room sometime around midnight, bringing the muted stench of antiseptic with him. Roy finally lifted his face to watch him chat with the pasta nurse briefly, and then turn, his mask hanging around his neck, to scan the crowd of anxious and waiting family and friends. His eyes landed on Roy and his face lit with recognition, and then fell just a bit. Roy dusted the collection of leather under the seat with his boot and stood.

“General Mustang,” the doctor shook Roy’s hand, once. “It’s nice to meet you. Were you the one who checked her in?”

“I checked her in,” Rebecca said, rising to meet them. “We were out walking when the contractions started. All she said the whole ride here was, ‘Call the general.’” Her shoulders shrugged as though she were uninterested in that little fact, but her curiosity and suspicion radiated as sharply as her anger did. 

The doctor looked to Roy and then Rebecca and then back again. He had deep bags under his eyes, deep enough to carry the weight of death and disappointment and bad news. His cheeks were sharp and sunken, as though he spent too much time on his feet and not enough time at a dinner table. He put a hand on Roy’s shoulder and guided him away from Rebecca, from the pasta nurse.

“Confidentiality,” the doctor started when they’d taken a few steps together. Roy read his nametag: Dr. Carol. 

“What about it?” Roy asked. He knew, of course, but he needed Dr. Carol to pry it from him. To take this secret he and Riza had cultivated, watered, sheltered for nine months and stretch it so thin it would snap. There was no other way.

“I can’t tell you how Riza Hawkeye is doing unless you were the father.”

Roy’s breath staggered into his throat, caught, and then dropped hard as a rock.

_Were._ _Were were were wer —_

Dr. Carol went on as though he had made no slip. But something broke inside of Roy. It cracked like ribs.

“Confidentiality means that I can let you into her room if you were the father — and that I can tell no one.”

Roy’s world tilted, blurred, fell off an unseen precipice and went plummeting down, down. He dropped his head, saw the veins crawling across his hands, saw his heartbeat through his thin skin. The world had stalled and the seconds had stalled with it, and now his heart was the only thing that meant time was moving. It beat when everything else had died. 

“She needs you,” Dr. Carol urged. There was a confirmation in those words. 

“Yeah, it’s — I’m,” Roy bunched his jacket into fists at his sides. He met Dr. Carol’s dull, sympathetic gaze through the fog of tears collecting in his eyes. “I’m the father,” he said, his voice impossibly low.

“Come with me,” Dr. Carol nodded, and said a swift goodbye to Rebecca, who stood knowingly in the hospital waiting room. She’d have words for Roy when he returned, although they’d be drenched in concern, empathy. The anger would part and drift away for this, Roy knew. He watched her slump back into her chair as the elevator doors slid shut in front of him, cutting him off from support. Slicing away at his connections beyond Riza and Dr. Carol and a baby who  _ was not _ .

There was a small bench outside of Riza’s room. Framed pictures of multicolored flowers hung in a row of three above it, painted in pink and yellow pastels. Normally Roy would think these pictures belonged, but tonight they made him feel unsettled, like they existed to somehow mitigate a blow. Dr. Carol offered for Roy to sit beneath them, but he politely declined. 

“How is she?” Roy pried. A safe question. Dr. Carol hadn’t referred to Riza in the past tense.

“She’s sleeping,” Dr. Carol said. “General Mustang,”  _ Here it comes here it comes here it comes  _ “her — your — baby was stillborn, sir, I’m very sorry.” He said it mechanically, like the good doctor he was. Like all he’d ever been taught to do in his entire life was deliver sadness at people’s feet. Roy’s shoulders sagged. 

“Stillborn,” Roy repeated. Because that’s all he could do. The world had already stopped.

“She was caught up in her umbilical cord. There was nothing we could do.”

“She—”

_ Stillborn _ .

It was worse than the  _ were _ . Roy had heard of babies being born stillborn, but even as a grown man he let himself believe that these things happen to people, not him. They were errant mistakes made by Truth or God or doctors or whoever governed over the safety of babies and they were as far off and away from Roy as oceans or polar bears. But here it was, chucked into the air around him, into the stuffy, mustard yellow hallway outside Riza’s room. His gentle, precious Riza. Robbed of something even  _ more _ .

“You can tell her or I can.” Dr. Carol said. He yanked Roy back into reality. 

“I’ll tell her,” Roy coughed, suddenly letting out too much air all at once, and then gasping at it again. Dr. Carol only inclined his head and left, his footsteps receding down the hall. Roy didn’t enter Riza’s room until his breath had been securely caught.

And she was awake, not asleep. Her keen eyes roamed over Roy and the dim room and the red dots on the monitor beside her bed. Light streamed in grey-tinged through her one window, coating the room in a ghostly white. Roy was almost glad for the cover because it meant she couldn’t see his face, but he should have known better than to underestimate her perceptiveness because she asked him, voice hoarse, “Where is my baby?”

Even in the near-darkness Roy could see her exhaustion. It played out around the outline of her bony shoulders, over the hills of her biceps, and hid in the subtle drop of her chin. 

Roy didn’t answer her. He stood near the door and sobbed quietly to himself, just a few times. He had wanted a moment to look at her while she slept, and to imagine the way her face might look when it broke, so he would be prepared. He was so foolish. 

“General, why are you in here? Where is my baby?”

Roy edged closer to the door, felt it on the tips of his fingers. Gravity was dragging him down — it was a weight on his feet and a weight on his head. 

“Roy,” Riza pleaded, stern but tearing at the seams. Roy wished he could put all the distance in the universe between them, and at the same time he wished he never had to leave her side. He was a coward here in this milky darkness. But how could he hurt her? He was going to, with his own words. How?

Riza began to move. She sat up in her bed and ripped the lines from her forearm, starting the blinking machine on a wild, whirring rampage. It beeped and protested, and Roy rushed in to silence it, and to gather Riza into his arms. She struggled only a bit before tiredness took her, and she settled heavily against him. “Where is my baby?” she breathed into the hollow of his throat. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, his teeth suctioned together, unwilling to let him break her. 

“You can’t protect me from the truth,” she told him, her hands wringing his jacket. She pressed her cheek hard into the crook of his collar bone, where it met his shoulder. He felt her tears shudder through her before he felt them wet his shirt.

She was right. She’d said something similar to him before, when he’d hidden Hughes’ death from the Elric brothers all those years ago. It didn’t save them, and it won’t save her. 

He told her. He let the words flow from his mouth in a tidal wave, in a rush of air. Riza fell to pieces in his arms, all at once she became a mass falling, falling. She doubled over in his lap, tearless cries echoing into the shadowy grey of the room. He held her face and whispered things to her that he didn’t remember saying as soon as he had said them. She held onto him like he was her lifeline, and he was, and he would be, even as the waters rushed into the ground and the oxygen was stolen right from their blood. 

**Author's Note:**

> this happens more often in our society than we think (it's happened to three of the women in my family) and after a talk with my mom the other night i was left with thoughts that needed to be set free, so here they are.


End file.
